I am a hobbyist roboticist and AI enthusiast. I once built
a 6 jointed robot hand, using the Robix RCS toolkit, to
look for the brightest source of light in a room. It held a
light receptor in its gripper hand. It's movements were
controlled by genetic algorithms. Each chromosome in the
population contained 6 genes; one gene per motor position
angle. The fitness test was the strength of the light
coming in from the photo receptor. I never entered it in
any competitions, but I had a great time building and
testing it. A funny anecdote about the hand. I tested it in
a dark room and at one point, the two best solutions for
the robot ended up being a light I turned on in the room,
and my forehead (reflected light)! It eventually settled on
the light.
I'm also an avid follower, and sometimes user, of the
primary AI software groups; neural nets, fuzzy logic,
machine vision, speech recognition and synthesis, etc.
Some more detail on the robotic hand. I built the hand in
the middle 1980's. I used two computer systems to drive it;
a Windows 3.1 system and a pure DOS machine. The DOS
machine ran the Robix driver programs which communicated
with the robot hand joint motors over an RS-232 port. I had
to use two machines because the Robix drivers needed real
time access to the robot hand motors. This meant you could
only run low level programs that used it's robot
programming language and not Window 3.1, on the same
machine. The genetic algorithm code was much easier to
write and test under Windows 3.1. The Windows 3.1 machine
communicated to the DOS machine over a custom written RS-
232 comm bridge module.
My latest project is creating an Android Forum
directory since I'm getting into Android phone development.
I hope to use an Android phone as my first remote device
for interacting with my Rovio mobile spy robot with. Later
I'd like to get something working on the iPhone too, but to
do iPhone development you have to learn Objective-C and
Cocoa, which I don't know (yet). Since I already have
experience with Java and Eclipse, the tools used when
developing Android applications, I'll do my first mobile
computing development on that platform.

Recent blog entries by roschler

Here's a comment of mine on the current state of the robot
industry and how the next great revolution in consumer
technology is being held back by the current economy.

Currently nobody wants to create a toy that costs more than
about $70 USD now and far better if it's around $30 to $40
(forget the $200 to $400 toy robots of the previous years).
Unemployment is still rising and the credit card companies
have jacked up rates on good and bad customers alike while
closing many accounts just to shore up their debt ratios;
two huge market forces which directly and significantly
reduce both the discretionary income (cash) and layaway
income(credit) a consumer has to buy goods. This leads to a
vicious cycle because the vendors whose goods they would buy
panic, cut their product lines (like robots this year), and
lay off employees (who are after all consumers themselves
and now have no salary to buy goods with).

It's so bad that in Japan, despite the fact it has one of
the fastest aging populations in the world and desperately
needs assisted robotics, those companies bringing those
innovations to market can't get people to buy their goods
(which admittedly are expensive but would have sold anyways
in better times).

On the utility side of consumer robotics you might as well
just call that market the Roomba market since there really
isn't anything else that dominates. There is the promise of
the telepresence and home surveillance market, but iRobot
dropped iConnectR like a bad habit, Meccanno released Spykee
but never followed up with their announced SDK, leaving
WowWee to fight the good fight on with Rovio. At least they
are soldiering on by continually upgrading Rovio's firmware
and helping customers fix their units when it's a parts
failure. The home teleprescence market should be moving
ahead a lot faster and stronger than it is. It's up to
WowWee to capitalize on it before a new player eats their lunch.

At E3 Peter Molyneux demonstrated Milo,
a game that features a rendered ten year old boy that you
converse with. Although Milo doesn't
have true natural language processing but instead mostly
extensive keyword recognition capability, "he" does have the
ability to detect emotion in your voice. This could have
interesting applications to robotics.

A quick note to those looking at WowWee's products shown at
the CES 2009 show. The Spyball, the rolling robot that can
morph between a ball and a spycam, does not have audio.
This is not be mentioned by the press. Rovio, it's big
brother release in 2008, does have two way audio and also is
capable of driving itself.

I'll be hosting another online Pleo
party with the help of Yahoo Live this Thursday, March 6
2008. If anyone wants to chat while watching my 3 Pleos
raise a ruckus in real time (with audio too), just visit my
Yahoo Live Robots
channel at 9 PM/EST on that date. To watch you just
need a Flash enabled browser. To chat you will need a Yahoo
ID (they're free).

CES 2008 brought quite a few new robots from WowWee.
One exciting entry was the FlyTech
Bladestar flying machine, a spinning propeller with the
unique twist of having sensors that allow it fly on
autopilot. The most interesting in my opinion is the Rovio
spy robot that allows you to monitor your home remotely
and easily create patrol routes to go to predetermined spots
in your home, using its point and click
navigation software.